Quality Function Deployment

QFD is a customer-oriented approach to product innovation and was first initiated in Japan in 1960 by Professors Shigeru Mizuno and Yoji Akao (Shiravastava & Verma, 2014:957). The purpose of them is to develop a quality assurance method that would design customer satisfaction into a product before it was manufactured.  The first application of QFD was in 1966 by Kiyotaka Oshiumi of Bridgestone Tire in Japan to identify each customer requirement (effect) and to identify the design substitute quality characteristics and process factors (causes) needed to control and measure it. The next application and the start of the popularity of QFD were in 1972 at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Limited in the Kobe Shipyard, Japan to design an oil tanker. QFD later become well-known worldwide after the successfulness of the implementation by multinational companies in North America such as General Motors, Ford, Xerox and Etc (Mazur, n.d; ).

The flexibility and comprehensiveness of QFD established a place for it as the comprehensive quality design system for both product and business process. It keep evolving until now to response the changing of business practices, markets operation, technology, as well as customer lifestyles. The expert has even came up with the international standardization that has been approved by International Organization for Standardization in December 2015, which is ISO 16335 for General principles and perspectives of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) (International Organization for Standardization, 2015). The standardization is hoped to help both novice and veteran product and process developers who use QFD as it describes the quality function deployment (QFD) process, its purpose, users, and tools (Quality Function Deployment Institute, 2015).

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is one of the product development techniques. According to Holmen and Kristensenon on Park, Ham, & Lee (2012:3) structured method for listening to the customer requirement/ need and transforms it into technical requirement to reach optimized design material and processes to ensure customer expectation are met (Park, Ham, & Lee( 2012:325); Qureshi, Khan, Bhatti, Khan, & Zaman (2012:1113)). QFD is considered the most complete and comprehensive method for integrating the goals of many processes and aligning them to the customer’s requirements. QFD methodology can be used for both tangible and intangible product such as manufacture goods, service industry, business process development etc (Büyüközkan & Çifçi, 2012:30). Furthermore, QFD is not only used in the development of new services but also can be used for the improvement of an existing service, which is the main area of application in this paper (Jaiswal, 2012:33).

QFD is seen as a pro-active customer driven planning process that enables problems to be identified and solved at the very beginning of a construction project (Chan and Wu on John, Smith, Chotipanich, & Pitt, 2014:73). The successful QFD application may result in greater customer focus, shorter lead times, and knowledge preservation (Liu on (Hsing & Chin, 2013:55))